Garden vs Jib

Garden is a DevOps automation tool for developing and testing Kubernetes applications. It creates production-like environments for development, testing, and CI on demand, then represents infrastructure, builds, services, and tests in a dependency-aware action graph. Graph-aware caching avoids rerunning unchanged images and tests. Garden Core uses YAML declarations to make workflows reproducible across developer machines and CI, and sync mode live-syncs changes to running deployments. Plugins cover Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Pulumi, and local scripts. Its Terraform provider validates and provisions infrastructure and exposes stack outputs to Garden actions; the Pulumi plugin is experimental and deploys stacks in dependency order. Garden Cloud's Remote Container Builder uses managed remote compute and shared Docker layer caches. Garden supports Linux, macOS, Windows, and self-hosted use. It requires Git 2.14 or newer, and local service builds need a local Kubernetes installation. The free tier has limits on build minutes, cache hits, and cache retention. Enterprise is a self-hosted Garden Cloud distribution installed into a customer's Kubernetes infrastructure.

Jib builds Docker and OCI images for Java applications without a Docker daemon. It can be used as a Maven or Gradle plugin, a Java library, or a command-line interface, and runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Jib divides application contents into layers, allowing code changes to be rebuilt without rebuilding the whole image. It can push images to a container registry of the user's choice, uses an OpenJDK base image by default, and accepts a custom base image. The project says that rebuilding an image from the same contents produces the same image. It supports local build caches and multi-architecture builds, and the project says it works well with Google Cloud Build. Examples cover Spring Boot, Micronaut, multi-module projects, and Spark Java with a Java Agent. Jib is free and open source under Apache License, Version 2.0. The project is not an officially supported Google product; it directs usage questions to Stack Overflow and also links to GitHub issues and a FAQ.